Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay
I hate this town.
The first chapter in this novel is short, but very ominous. This is also the start of a trilogy, which I am excited about reading all of. We don’t know who the speaker is, but I’m excited to find out.
This book opens with one of the main characters, David Harwood, arriving at his cousin Marla’s house to find blood on the doorstep and Marla holding a baby. She claims “an angel” bought the baby, which clearly is not hers. Marla is also said to have recently lost a baby, and has committed a previous kidnapping offense.
When David does go to return the baby, he discovers the mother has been murdered. This being a Linwood Barclay story, the obvious answer is definitely not going to be correct; this something that I've known since his first novel, No Time for Goodbye.
The book also includes a string of bizarre happenings, all related to the number 23, for example 23 squirrels being killed and mannequins being placed in car number 23 of a carousel, but it is not clear what this means; this seems to be one of the main plot strands that will continue into the second and third books, although I suspect that there will be a few connections to this book’s premise in the subsequent titles.
This book got confusing at times as I found that I had to follow several different characters, and it got a bit hard to tell who was a villain and who wasn’t at several times, with the number of times that the plot went off in a completely unexpected direction. When the full explanation of what had happened finally came, it made sense, and as usual there were a lot of things I did not expect. The only real issue I had though was that after the biggest revelation, the plot slowed down a lot as characters constantly spelled out to others what I already knew as the reader.
The narrative style was a little unusual too; while most of the story was in the third person, a few chapters focused on David, and were told in the first person, entirely from his point of view; I wasn’t entirely sure why this was done.
I am looking forward to reading the second title, Far from True.